Barrayar b-2

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Oh.” Koudelka’s voice went small.

  “She’s not, as it happens.” (Kou echoed himself with another small “Oh.”) “But she’s mad at you now, and I don’t blame her.”

  “But if she doesn’t think I—what reason?”

  “You don’t see it?” She frowned at Aral. “You either?”

  “Well …”

  “It’s because you just insulted her, Kou. Not then, but right now, in this room. And not just in slighting her combat prowess. What you just said revealed to her, for the first time, that you were so intent on yourself that night, you never saw her at all. Bad, Kou. Very bad. You owe her a profound apology. Here she was, giving her Barrayaran all to you, and you so little appreciated what she was doing, you didn’t even perceive it.”

  His head came up suddenly. “Gave me? Like some charity?”

  “Gift of the gods, more like,” murmured Aral, lost in some appreciation of his own.

  “I’m not a—” Koudelka’s head swiveled toward the door. “Are you saying I should run after her?”

  “Crawl, actually, if I were you,” recommended Aral. “Crawl fast. Slither under her door, go belly-up, let her stomp on you till she gets it out of her system. Then apologize some more. You may yet save the situation.” Aral’s eyes were openly alight with amusement now.

  “What do you call that? Total surrender?” said Kou indignantly.

  “No. I’d call it winning.” His voice grew a shade cooler. “I’ve seen the war between men and women descend to scorched-earth heroics. Pyres of pride. You don’t want to go down that road. I guarantee it.”

  “You’re—Milady! You’re laughing at me! Stop!”

  “Then stop making yourself ridiculous,” said Cordelia sharply. “Get your head out of your ass. Think for sixty consecutive seconds about somebody besides yourself.”

  “Milady. Milord.” His teeth were gritted now with frozen dignity. He bowed himself out, well slapped. But he turned the wrong way in the hallway, the opposite direction to which Droushnakovi had fled, and clattered down the end stairs.

  Aral shook his head helplessly, as Koudelka’s footsteps faded. A splutter escaped him.

  Cordelia punched him softly on the arm. “Stop that! It’s not funny to them.” Their eyes met; she sniggered, then caught her breath firmly. “Good heavens, I think he wanted to be a rapist. Odd ambition. Has he been hanging around with Bothari too much?”

  This slightly sick joke sobered them both. Aral looked thoughtful. “I think … Kou was flattering his self-doubts. But his remorse was sincere.”

  “Sincere, but a trifle smug. I think we may have coddled his self-doubts long enough. It may be time to tack his tail.”

  Aral’s shoulders slumped wearily. “He owes her, no doubt. Yet what should I order him to do? It’s worthless, if he doesn’t pay freely.”

  Cordelia growled agreement.

  It wasn’t until lunch that Cordelia noticed something missing from their little world.

  “Where’s the Count?” she asked Aral, as they found the table set only for two by Piotr’s housekeeper, in a front dining room overlooking the lake. The day had failed to warm. The earlier mist had risen only to clot into low scudding grey clouds, windy and chilly. Cordelia had added an old black fatigue jacket of Aral’s over her flowered blouse.

  “I thought he went to the stables. For a training session with that new dressage prospect of his,” said Aral, also regarding the table uneasily. “That’s what he told me he was going to do.”

  The housekeeper, bringing in soup, volunteered, “No, m’lord. He went off in the groundcar early, with two of his men.”

  “Oh. Excuse me.” Aral nodded to Cordelia and rose, and exited the dining room to the back hall. One of the storerooms on the back side of the house, wedged into the slope, had been converted into a secured comm center, with a double=scrambled comconsole and a full=time ImpSec guard outside its door. Aral’s footsteps echoed down the hall in that direction.

  Cordelia took one bite of soup, which went down like liquid lead, set her spoon aside, and waited. She could hear Aral’s voice, in the quiet house, and electronically tinged responses in some stranger’s tones, but too muffled for her to make out the words. After what seemed a small eternity, though in fact the soup was still hot, Aral returned, bleak-faced.

  “Did he go up there?” Cordelia asked. “To ImpMil?”

  “Yes. He’s been and left. It’s all right.” His heavy jaw was set.

  “Meaning, the baby’s all right?”

  “Yes. He was denied admittance, he argued awhile, he left. Nothing worse.” He began glumly spooning soup.

  The Count returned a few hours later. Cordelia heard the fine whine of his groundcar pass up the drive and around the north end of the house, pause, a canopy open and close, and the car continue on to the garages, sited over the crest of the hill near the stables. She was sitting with Aral in the front room with the new big windows. He had been engrossed in some government report on his handviewer, but at the sound of the closing canopy put it on “pause” and waited with her, listening, as hard footsteps passed rapidly around the house and up the front steps. Aral’s mouth was taut with unpleased anticipation, his eyes grim. Cordelia shrank back in her chair, and steeled her nerves.

  Count Piotr swung into their room, and stood, feet planted. He was formally dressed in his old uniform with his general’s rank insignia. “There you are.” The liveried man trailing him took one uneasy glance at Aral and Cordelia, and removed himself without waiting to be dismissed. Count Piotr didn’t even notice him go.

  Piotr focused on Aral first. “You. You dared to shame me in public. Entrap me.”

  “You shamed yourself, I fear, sir. If you had not gone down that path, you would not have found that trap.”

  Piotr’s tight jaw worked this one over, the lines in his face grooved deep. Anger; embarrassment struggling with self-righteousness. Embarrassed as only one in the wrong can be. He doubts himself, Cordelia realized. A thread of hope. Let us not lose that thread, it may be our only way out of this labyrinth.

  The self-rightousness took ascendance. “I shouldn’t have to be doing this,” snarled Piotr. “It’s women’s work. Guarding our genome.”

  “Was women’s work, in the Time of Isolation,” said Aral in level tones. “When the only answer to mutation was infanticide. Now there are other answers.”

  “How strange women must have felt about their pregnancies, never knowing if there was life or death at the end of them,” Cordelia mused. One sip from that cup was all she desired for a lifetime, and yet Barrayaran women had drained it to the dregs over and over … the wonder was not that their descendants’ culture was chaotic, but that it wasn’t more completely insane.

  “You fail all of us when you fail to control her,” said Piotr. “How do you imagine you can run a planet when you cannot run your own household?”

  One corner of Aral’s mouth twisted up slightly. “Indeed, she is difficult to control. She escaped me twice. Her voluntary return still astounds me.”

  “Awake to your duties! To me as your Count if not as your father. You are liege-sworn to me. Do you choose to obey this off-worlder woman before me?”

  “Yes.” Aral looked him straight in the eye. His voice fell to a whisper. “That is the proper order of things.” Piotr flinched. Aral added dryly, “Attempting to switch the issue from infanticide to obedience will not help you, sir. You taught me specious-rhetoric-chopping yourself.”

  “In the old days, you could have been beheaded for less insolence.”

  “Yes, the present setup is a little peculiar. As a count’s heir, my hands are between yours, but as your Regent, your hands are between mine. Oath-stalemate. In the old days we could have broken the deadlock with a nice little war.” He grinned back, or at least bared his teeth. Cordelia’s mind gyrated, One day only: The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object. Tickets, five marks.

  The door to the hallway swung open, and Li
eutenant Koudelka peered nervously within. “Sir? Sorry to interrupt. I’m having trouble with the comconsole. It’s down again.”

  “What sort of trouble, Lieutenant?” Vorkosigan asked, wrenching his attention around with an effort. “The intermittency?”

  “It’s just not working.”

  “It was fine a few hours ago. Check the power supply.”

  “Did that, sir.”

  “Call a tech.”

  “I can’t, without the comconsole.”

  “Ah, yes. Get the guard commander to open it up for you, then, see if the trouble is anything obvious. Then send for a tech on his clear-link.”

  “Yes, sir.” Koudelka backed out, after a wary glance at the three tense people still frozen in their places waiting for him to withdraw.

  The Count wouldn’t quit. “I swear, I will disown it. That thing in the can at ImpMil. Utterly disinherit it.”

  “Not an operative threat, sir. You can only directly disown me. By an Imperial order. Which you would have to humbly petition, ah … me, for.” His edged smile gleamed. “I would, of course, grant it to you.”

  The muscles in Piotr’s jaw jumped. Not the irresistible force and the immovable object after all, but the irresistible force and some fluid sea; Piotr’s blows kept failing to land, splashing past helplessly. Mental judo. He was off-balance, and flailed for his center, striking out wildly now. “Think of Barrayar. Think of the example you’re setting.”

  “Oh,” breathed Aral, “that I have.” He paused. “We have never led from the rear, you or I. Where a Vorkosigan goes, maybe others might not find it so impossible to follow. A little personal … social engineering.”

  “Maybe for galactics. But our society can’t afford this luxury. We barely hold our own as it is. We cannot carry the deadweight of millions of dysfunctionals!”

  “Millions?” Aral raised a brow. “Now you extrapolate from one to infinity. A weak argument, sir, unworthy of you.”

  “And surely,” said Cordelia quietly, “how much is bearable each individual, carrying his or her own burden, must decide.”

  Piotr swung on her. “Yes, and who is paying for all this, eh? The Imperium. Vaagen’s laboratory is budgeted under military research. All Barrayar is paying for prolonging the life of your monster.”

  Discomfited, Cordelia replied, “Perhaps it will prove a better investment than you think.”

  Piotr snorted, his head lowered mulishly, hunched between his skinny shoulders. He stared through Cordelia at Aral. “You are determined to lay this thing on me. On my house. I cannot persuade you otherwise, I cannot order you … very well. You’re so set on change, here’s a change for you. I don’t want my name on that thing. I can deny you that, if nothing else.”

  Aral’s lips were pinched, nostrils flaring. But he never moved in his seat. The viewer glowed on, forgotten in his still hands. He held his hands quiet and totally controlled, not permitting them to clench. “Very well, sir.”

  “Call him Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, then,” said Cordelia, feigning calm over a sick and trembling belly. “My father will not begrudge it.”

  “Your father is dead,” snapped Piotr.

  Smeared to bright plasma in a shuttle accident more than a decade ago … She sometimes fancied, when she closed her eyes, that she could still sense his death imprinted on her retina in magenta and teal. “Not wholly. Not while I live, and remember.”

  Piotr looked as if she’d just hit him in his Barrayaran stomach. Barrayaran ceremonies for the dead approached ancestor-worship, as if remembrance could keep the souls alive. Did his own mortality run chill in his veins today? He had gone too far, and knew it, but could not back down. “Nothing, nothing wakes you up! Try this, then.” He straddled the floor, boots planted, and glared at Aral. “Get out of my house. Both houses, Vorkosigan House, too. Take your woman and remove yourself. Today!”

  Aral’s eyes flicked only once around his childhood home. He set the viewer carefully aside, and stood. ’Very well, sir.”

  Piotr’s anger was anguished. “You’d throw away your home for this?!”

  “My home is not a place. It is a person, sir,” Aral said gravely. Then added reluctantly, “People.”

  Meaning Piotr, as well as Cordelia. She sat bent over, aching with the tension. Was the old man stone? Even now Aral offered him gestures of courtesy that nearly stopped her heart.

  “You will return your rents and revenues to the District purse,” said Piotr desperately.

  “As you wish, sir.” Aral headed for the door.

  Piotr’s voice went smaller. “Where will you live?”

  “Illyan has been urging me for some time to move to the Imperial Residence, for security reasons. Evon Vorhalas has persuaded me Illyan is right.”

  Cordelia had risen when Aral did. She went now to the window and stared out over the moody grey, green, and brown landscape. Whitecaps foamed on the pewter water of the lake. The Barrayaran winter was going to be so cold… .

  “So, you set yourself up with Imperial airs after all, eh?” jibed Piotr. “Is that what this is, hubris?”

  Aral grimaced in profound irritation. “On the contrary, sir. If I’m to have no income but my admiral’s half-pay, I cannot afford to pass up rent-free quarters.”

  A movement in the scudding clouds caught Cordelia’s eye. She squinted uneasily. “What’s wrong with that lightflyer?” she murmured half to herself.

  The speck grew, jinking oddly. It trailed smoke. It stuttered over the lake, straight at them. “God, I wonder if it’s full of bombs?”

  “What?” said Aral and Piotr together, and stepped quickly to the window with her, Aral on her right hand, Piotr on her left.

  “It has ImpSec markings,” said Aral.

  Piotr’s old eyes narrowed. “Ah?”

  Cordelia mentally planned a sprint down the back hall and out the end door. There was a bit of a ditch on the other side of the drive, if they went flat in it maybe … but the lightflyer was slowing at the end of its trajectory. It wobbled toward a landing on the front lawn. Men in Vorkosigan livery and ImpSec green and black cautiously surrounded it. The flyer’s damage was clearly visible now, a plasma-slagged hole, black smears of soot, warped control surfaces—it was a miracle it flew at all.

  “Who—?” said Aral.

  Piotr’s squint sharpened as a glimpse of the pilot winked through the damaged canopy. “Ye gods, it’s Negri!”

  “But who’s that with—come on!” Aral flung over his shoulder, running out the door. They charged in his wake, around into the front hall, bursting out the door and churning down the green slope.

  The guards had to pry open the warped canopy. Negri fell into their arms. They laid him on the grass. He had a grotesque burn a meter long on the left side of his body and thigh, his green uniform melted and charred away to reveal bleeding white bubbles, cracked—open flesh. He shivered uncontrollably.

  The short figure strapped into the passenger seat was Emperor Gregor. The five-year-old boy was weeping in terror, not loudly, just muffled, gulping, suppressed whimpers. Such self-control in one so young seemed sinister to Cordelia. He should be screaming. She felt like screaming. He wore ordinary play-clothes, a soft shirt and pants in dark blue. He was missing one shoe. An ImpSec guard unhooked his seat belt and dragged him out of the flyer. He cringed from the man and stared at Negri in utter horror and confusion. Did you think adults were indestructible, child? Cordelia grieved.

  Kou and Drou materialized from their separate holes in the house, to goggle along with the rest of the guards. Gregor spotted Droushnakovi, and flew to her like an arrow, to wind his hands tightly in her skirt. “Droushie, help!” His crying dared to become audible, then. She wrapped her arms around him and lifted him up.

  Aral knelt by the injured ImpSec chief. “Negri, what happened?”

  Negri reached up and grabbed his jacket with his working right hand. “He’s trying for a coup—in the capital. His troops took ImpSec, took the comm center—why didn
’t you respond? HQ surrounded, infiltrated—bad fighting now at the Imperial Residence. We were on to him—about to arrest—he panicked. Struck too soon. I think he has Kareen—”

  Piotr demanded, “Who has, Negri, who?”

  “Vordarian.”

  Aral nodded grimly. “Yes …”

  “You—take the boy,” gasped Negri. “He’s almost on top of us …” His shivers oscillated into convulsions, his eyes rolling back whitely. His breath stuttered in resonant chokes. His brown eyes refocused in sudden intensity. “Tell Ezar—” The convulsions took him again, racking his thick body. Then they stopped. All stop. He was no longer breathing.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Sir,” said Koudelka urgently to Vorkosigan, “the secured comconsole was sabotaged.” The ImpSec guard commander at his elbow nodded confirmation. “I was just coming to tell you. …” Koudelka glanced fearfully at Negri’s body, laid out on the grass. Two ImpSec men now knelt beside it frantically applying first aid: heart massage, oxygen, and hypospray injections. But the body remained flaccid under their pummeling, the face waxy and inert. Cordelia had seen death before, and recognized the symptoms. No good, fellows, you won’t call this one back. Not this time. He’s gone to deliver that last message to Ezar in person. Negri’s last report …

  “What time-frame on the sabotage?” demanded Vorkosigan. “Delayed or immediate?”

  “It looked like immediate,” reported the guard commander. “No sign of a timer or device. Somebody just broke open the back and smashed it up inside.”

  Everyone’s eyes went to the ImpSec man who had been assigned the guard post outside the comconsole room. He stood, dressed like most of the others in black fatigues, disarmed between two of his fellows. They had followed their commander out when the uproar began on the front lawn. The prisoner’s face was about the same lead-grey color as Negri’s, but animated by flickering fear.

  “And?” Vorkosigan said to the guard commander. “He denies doing it,” shrugged the commander. “Naturally.”

  Vorkosigan looked at the arrestee. “Who went in after me?”